EPISODE 2 - FINAL - What We Did Wrong
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 8:06AM • 17:17
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, culture, numbers, good, employee, staff, profitable, great, selling, bulk billing, increase, corporate partnerships, leave, learning, list, nutrition, built, helped, private, early
Sorry to say, but conflict is not something you're great at dealing with. Stacey’s kind of breaks out in a rash and would run. I'm not great in that I'm probably too abrupt. So the two of us together, we're not great with conflict.
Welcome to How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. If you love nutrition, and you love helping people, and you want to be in the game long enough to keep doing that, then this is the podcast for you.
Let's get into it.
Okay, so welcome back to How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. I am once again with my wife and business partner, Stacey Hughes, and today we're going to talk about our learnings. I'm not allowed to say our failures or our learnings from our time with owning a nutrition business. Now, it was a business that we built up from, as I said, in previous episodes, $0 or negative dollars up to 1.4 million, which sounds great, but there were plenty of mistakes that we made in today, we sort of touched on them in other episodes, but we're going to sort of dive a bit deeper into those today. So Stace, what's number one for you? Well, number one for me is we didn't nurture our list. We didn't know or put value on building a list. So we had our database a Chris had built a database for clients information. And we also had a lead magnet on our website that was going to MailChimp, I think it was, but we didn't we didn't put an importance on actually building that list. And the next step from that, nurturing that list. Yeah, we got we got better at it got better as the time went on.
Well, list of like 26,000 people. List in itself is valuable. Yeah. And it's a balance, isn't it? I mean, for me, as a health professional, I was quite hesitant about sort of doing that email marketing, because I'm a health professional people come to see me because I want to, you know, you sort of get out of that you need to survive as a business and you don't want to pester anyone, but ultimately, you got to remember, and you would nag me all the time that you're helping people by getting them to come and see. But I didn't want to be seen as someone who was instantly selling to them. Spamming. Yeah.
And we could have done it a lot better by managing people's expectations of like, what the appointment was going to be like, we could have done that with email. And then we could have had a post appointment nurture sequence, like what happens after your appointment or in between appointments? Yeah, that may have helped retention as well.
We got there as well. But just in dribs and drabs,
We should have had it more set automated. Yes.
Yeah. So yeah, that was that was a big learning. I don't know how many dollars we've left on the table there. But quite significant. And given that, you know, we're not really that great an area population was where we're servicing. We had five offices. But yeah, that's a big market to just leave behind. But anyway, that's something that we've sort of learned in our new businesses, and we sort of grow our to the email list. There was a conference that we went to a little while back, and it was talking about owning your list. And so the thing is now with them, if you've read I think it might be Russell Brunson his books, like social media can shut you off overnight, they can change the algorithm, I can do whatever, you don't own that list. It doesn't matter how many followers whose 1000 people in a Facebook group and it got shut down overnight?
Yeah, she's lost. So that, you know, they can't do anything about that. principles don't even have to reply it. Whereas if you own the email list, you own your emails. Okay. So that's number one.
Number two, would be culture. We, when we were a smaller team, we really put a lot of emphasis on culture. And this is kind of a lot of stuff that we learned through business blueprint, things like having daily huddles. So we had, we have two people in the Philippines, two virtual assistants. So we actually made even about three at some point. And plus all of our staff in all other locations, we found it really beneficial to have those morning meetings, even if it was just 15 minutes. So it's regular contact. And we always started off the meeting with a wins, you had to say something that you're grateful for, or something good that had happened to you. And then we went into the bulk of the meeting, which was you know, what we were working on things like that. So yeah, that was really good for culture
We had, so because we had those people in remote locations or dietitian in an office by themselves, that little connection every day was quite important. And it's interesting that we had certain staff that didn't like the daily wins. They didn't like that there had to be positive. And they weren't great for our culture. I would it would be fair to say though, staff how we handled that was our fault. We probably didn't handle that effectively. But either way, it was interesting, you know, like those daily meetings or the interactions that you're having with your staff that working remotely you may not have had. And so you really then start to sort of work out who you want your business and who you don't. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so we had a great culture early on. You were really good at like their birthdays and getting them presents and every quarter we do some sort of training. So team training or team lunch.
COVID threw us, they're like we were good. COVID sort of impacted on us. And then we sort of spaced them out, which we thought would be good. But that was detrimental because the girls did like getting together. Yeah. Our team grew to quite a size of, there we’re like 18 people.
Yeah, we mentioned that on the other podcast, we were at a conference when they say zero to 12 is great. 12 to 50 is a nightmare. And we're at 12 and had a job. And it was so true. I don't know. Yeah, that was quite weird how exactly it was, it was, become quite difficult to manage the staff after that. But anyway, like we I think we still could have done a lot better. Our culture, we were good with our employee retention, like we would do send out dieticians over the US if they stayed with us for two years to redo to go during COVID. I don't think that helped our culture. I think they were quite frustrated by that.
Understandably, you know, they were due to get trip over to the states and they couldn't leave couldn't leave Queensland, let alone Australia. So anyway, that didn't hurt. And then our culture really started to slip.
And this is like an area that we just weren't skilled in. But like when you get someone who's cancerous in the business, how do you handle that like conflict, sorry to say, but conflict is not something you're great at dealing with. Stacey kind of breaks out in a rash and would run, I'm not great in that I'm probably too abrupt. So the two of us together were not great with conflict. And then it started to slip. So we ended up letting an employee go quite abruptly, because she was quite detrimental to the culture. And then our culture, we didn't handle that well. We just didn't recover. She was quite popular with workmates. But then from there, it went downhill. And, you know, I think 99% of that is our fault. We could have, we could have done that a lot better. Our communication was probably lacking significantly.
But we were probably on the way out to then when we like when we wanted to sell the business and travel Australia. And we kind of checked out early and that was obvious in our culture slipped as a result. So yes, letting a culture slip if you want to stay in the business, or even if you don't want to stay in the business, I think keeping culture vibrant is important. Because when you sell the business, you want those people to still stay in the business. Our numbers was probably number three. So we were financially illiterate early on, which joked about that that was probably a saving grace early. But going back likewise, you know, and all these conferences we go to to successful business owners, they know every cent where it goes, we were living on the business like it was funding our lifestyle, whereas we should have been managing our money a lot better.
Yeah, we weren't making decisions based around money or just making decisions on you know, whether we needed something or wanted to do something. Yeah. But not based on the numbers. Not Yeah, based on the income numbers, but not on the profit, or the profit that was available.
So yeah. And we always got by and sort of kept their heads above water. But I think with good money management, what would you suggest? Like I said, like, we started the business again, right? Let's say we're going into tomorrow, what would you do to improve your financial literacy? Get a bookkeeper and
an accountant where you pay a monthly fee. And the bookkeeper does all of your books up to date, your lifetime. And gives you a monthly report at the end of your expenses. And which is what else. Yeah, so we've just signed up with a new accounting firm. And that's what we've signed up to. So they, so it's all built into the one monthly cost, which I also like, you're not getting that big bill at the end of the year once you do your tax return. So this is a monthly fee. They do all our BAS returns all our bookkeeping, our tax returns for the company and ourselves. And we're going to report we've got things to work on like green light, orange, light, red light things as well. So I think yeah, going forward. Now, that would have been really good to have when we were CQ Nutrition as well, because we were very reactive without keeping up to date with our bookkeeping and stuff like that.
Yeah. Would you do a course to increase your own goal? Maybe? Yeah, yeah. I would like to like when time permits, it's something that I think I'd like. I mean, I know roughly what I'm looking at, but it'd be great to just have that sort of higher-level knowledge.
Okay, so number four, what would you say number four? Is the price increasing like me probably didn't do that often enough.
We probably should’ve done that every quarter increased by 1%. Guilty? Yeah, increase was really hard to get to increase pricing, or we should have more packaging, bundles things like that add value and increase price, which we did do that at the end. And that saved us a lot of the time oftentimes, but we could have done it better.
Yeah, I mean, we were bulk billing initially. So I guess the evolution of our business was that I would charge a gap. So for those who don't know bulk billing is just to recap is that basically we get a referral from a doctor. The client doesn't pay the government picks up the bill. So we initially would charge a gap for private paying clients but then over bulk below the pension is in kids. And then I just went 100% bulk billing because it was just so much easier. And our referrals exploded it didn't like it really did help her business because the doctor sort of like great I can send someone there for free, which kind of told me that they didn't really value, dietitians for a start, but that it was a platform where we grew our business. And then what we did and this was done on the reflection of our numbers was that our private numbers grew over time. And that's when we become profitable. But with our privates, I still didn't want to increase the price. I was so nervous, because I'm about like, you know, people coming to see me for free. Why would I want to charge more to the people that are coming to see me privately? And every single time we did it, no one bought no one said a word. No one even noticed. I was the only person so last night sleeps nervous about the price increase? No. Okay, so yeah, so we definitely No, the thing is, like, if we were seeing 300 People were weak. I don't know, I think the numbers may have been something to that effect. $5 per person per week, it is adding $1,500 to the bottom one, which it was it was huge. Anyway, another lesson learned yet. Learning not failure.
I went to a seminar recently at Business Blueprint. And the speaker said you should increase your prices every quarter by 1%. At least minimum. Yeah, right. Every quarter. should do that. Yeah. Okay. That would be hard in terms of decimals. Oh, obviously, round up, whatever. Yeah, I've been doing it. Since I heard it's being every quarter and 90 days I increase my prices.
Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Yep. So it should have increased prices more. And but with that, you really got to make sure there's value and we did. We didn't come to that we really package things up in the end.
And you know, we're in one community and accountability. And we were able to provide that. Yes, yeah, we offered more than just information, which was great.
Okay, so number five would be corporate partnerships. So, we did explore this a little bit. And that is when other businesses came to us asking, Could we run programs for their employees? Yeah, we didn't even chase them.
But we did. We did my health for life and things like that. So that sort of, yes, the brown work or a base?
I think it was on the back of our challenges. We used to run those challenges. And that just got so much publicity, our private numbers exploded marketing
And then good marketing exercise. And then we had those big corporations that were, you know, wanting us to do employee wellness stuff, which is quite lucrative, easy.
Doing a landing page really explored that? Well, LinkedIn, I should have been on LinkedIn actively then. Yeah. Whereas we weren't. So we were bogged down at the bulk billing, low profitability, end of our business. But again, you know, we sort of moved in the right direction, and we learnt and have we have not been burnt out by the early years of our business. I mean, that's possibly the space we'll be focusing on right now.
One thing that you do have to look at is what is the most profitable things in your business? And then put your I think we did learn this early on, where when we looked at remember, every team training or whatever, we would have a pie chart with how many was bulk billed, and how many were private. And we gradually moved that pie chart to be a bigger amount of progress. Yeah. And you could also do that for your profitable arms as well. And we kind of did that as well. But yeah, really focus on those ones that are profitable and spend more attention on those.
And it's, it's not just Well, I mean, it is it's the profit, but making sure that you're factoring in the hourly rate I like so it's about how easy it is to make that money, provide a good service and be effective, because you might have something that's bringing a lot of revenue, but requires quite a lot of effort in the corporate space was quite good. Okay, any other learnings Stace? Yes, when it came to selling our business, we realize we didn't have water tight employee contracts, especially for those employees that we had employed years ago. So we always just, we didn't worry too much about trade. And we always thought, you know, we knew how hard it was to operate a business. And we always thought that if somebody wanted to leave and start up their own practice, then go for it, because we know how difficult it was. So we didn't really put in any restraints around deed of restraint.
Yeah, I guess my learning from that is run your business like a young seller? Yeah. Did the employee contract us we did not give a shit. Because if someone wants to see if your employees want to set up and run against us, go for it, fill your boots, when you heard it was and how I mean, I only survived because I had you. And so trying to do that by yourself would have been really hard. But that sort of hurt us when we're selling the business type contract, and then that can come back to your financials and because the other thing to that as well is that our accountant advised us not to tell our staff when we're selling and we want to we went against that advice stupidly, because we wanted to be honest with our staff. We didn't want them to find out secondhand. But what happened is they when they found out we had quite a few staff leave, particularly when they found out who was a potential buyer, and they didn't want to work for this person and would have resigned. The value of our business deteriorated overnight, because we were honest and told her stuff that we were selling. So that that was a massive learning for us. But it's hard like you work with these people for so long. You want to sort of keep an open relationship with them. And yeah, anyway, so in the end, they left and they could set up against the person that was a potential buyer for us, which meant they didn't want to pay much for our business, which is understandable. But again, we just wanted out I mean, we would have shut the doors and given it away. We were checked out. Yeah, we had the caravan and the car. We were off. We were on holiday.
So yeah, it probably is advice there is to always operate like you are going to sell. Yes. Just Yeah. Listen to your accountants advice.
Listen to the professional. Look, we've probably got many more learnings. But I think that's probably the core ones would you say? Yes, yeah.
So just just to recap then. So it was about knowing your numbers, becoming financially financially literate and educated, knowing what you're doing, nurturing your list, making sure that you know, you've constantly communicating and talking to those potential customers maintain a really good employee culture, run your business, like you're going to sell your business, even if you have no intention to corporate partnerships, put the avenues in your business that are potentially profitable for the least amount of work. Try not to get busy. It's that 8020 rule. Isn't it lucky? What are the things that are the most profitable that you're spending the least amount of time on? And the last one was, and the last one is listening? Listen to the experts, you know, take advice on board. Yeah. Don't go with your gut instinct a lot of times.
All right, that's a wrap. Thanks for listening and join us next week for the next podcast. Thanks. Thank you. Do you find this podcast valuable? There may be other nutrition professionals out there will also be like, share and subscribe. It's going to help other nutrition professionals make an impact on the world just like you Thanks
